vWorkspace has announced the general availability of vWorkspace 7.5. This article talks about some of the new features.

vWorkspace 7.5 - the 'how' (and wow!)

In a previous post we talked about what goals we had in mind for vWorkspace 7.5, so now let’s talk features! Actually, there a so many major new features that we could not possibly talk about all of these in this blog post. Instead, this blog will highlight the features that we have chosen to lead with. During the next weeks however we will discuss all new features in details in a series of our popular ‘feature spotlights’, so stay tuned for that!

Sometimes it is hard to summarize an entire product release in a few words. This release is no different but thankfully a picture says more than a thousand words:

Pudding and Proof

This is not something we dreamt up but this is actually from a whitepaper that we wrote that compares the cost and speed of desktop virtualization for the leading products in the market today. Of course we understand the skepticism of any vendor-issued whitepaper but we really think this one is different. We cordially invite you -maybe even challenge you- to read the whitepaper. You will see that we used publicly available information, industry standard technologies (like LoginVSI) and documented our testing approach to produce a whitepaper that is factually correct and objective. No matter what you find, we would love to know what you think (leave a comment on this blog post). Several key technologies lie at the basis of the dramatic savings that vWorkspace 7.5 is able to provide for its customers. Let’s have a closer look at these technologies:

Hyper-V Catalyst Components

The Hyper-V Catalyst Components (HCC) is a set of technologies that enhance Microsoft Hyper-V to make it the best hypervisor for desktop virtualization deployments. Two key technologies in the Hyper-V Catalyst Components are HyperCache (patent-pending) and HyperDeploy (also patent-pending). HyperCache is a technology that caches the most commonly used parts (blocks) for a virtual desktop in memory of the host, allowing for IOPS savings that can easily go up to more than 99%!

As IOPS are the most common bottleneck in VDI deployments today, it should go without saying that HyperCache is instrumental in lowering the cost of desktop virtualization. It is very important to understand that these amazing savings are delivered out of the box with a zero-touch deployment with any required reboots that can be reverted from at any time without any impact to the desktop that you have already created using vWorkspace.

HyperDeploy allows customers to instantly provision many desktops across many different hosts without requiring the local presence of the golden image before doing so, thus tremendously increasing deployment speeds and business agility for customers.

Direct Hyper-V Integration

vWorkspace introduces direct integration with Hyper-V. Those of you familiar with vWorkspace will probably think ‘didn’t vWorkspace already integrate directly with Hyper-V’ and you’d be right! vWorkspace has always had the tightest integration with Microsoft virtualization product and direct Microsoft Hyper-V integration is no exception – we introduced it as the first in the market in 2008.

However, vWorkspace 7.5 takes this integration to a whole new level.First of all, vWorkspace completely supports FREE Microsoft Hyper-V Server and does so with complete virtual desktop lifecycle management capabilities, from virtual desktop creation to deletion and everything in between.

Of course this includes integrating with key Hyper-V technologies such as Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX. Similar to the Hyper-V Catalyst Components, our direct Hyper-V integration is ‘zero-touch’ and with no reboots; all you need is a (free) Hyper-V host and administrative credentials and vWorkspace handles the rest.

vWorkspace Desktop Clouds

A new option in vWorkspace 7.5 is to deploy virtual desktops in a vWorkspace Desktop Cloud. vWorkspace Desktop Clouds continuously guarantee the best performance for virtual desktops and the connected user by applying advanced, configurable load balancing. In addition, vWorkspace Desktop Clouds make ongoing administration a breeze. Adding capacity to a vWorkspace Desktop Cloud can be done in a matter of seconds.

Updating a vWorkspace Desktop Cloud to a new version of the corporate golden image for hundreds or even thousands of desktops can be done in a matter of minutes. This can be done as part of a maintenance schedule or on the fly. As users log off vWorkspace will update their virtual desktop to the latest version of the golden image, while their user preferences and settings willl of course be retained using the new and improved user profile management in vWorkspace 7.5, so the change is seamless to the end user.

Learn More

During the next couple of weeks we will discuss these and all the other new functionality in much more detail right here on our blog, so make sure to stay tuned for that.

In the mean while we understand that you will want to have a look for yourself. There’s nothing we’d like more. Here are some things you can do to learn more: